1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for managing events or appointments in a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for managing conflicts in a calendar.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic calendars are commonly used to record events and appointments. Electronic calendars act like date books and provide features, such as automatic entries for regular events and signaling of upcoming events. Further, electronic calendars also allow user's to send calendar invitations to events or appointments to other users. If other users accept the calendar invitations, the particular appointment is scheduled in both of the users' calendars. Electronic calendar usage has become quite sophisticated. Calendars may be provided as stand-alone programs or applications. Calendars often are provided as part of a personal productivity application, such as Lotus Notes® and Microsoft Outlook. Lotus Notes® is a product of International Business Machines Corporation. Additionally, Lotus Notes® is a registered trademark. Microsoft Outlook is a product from Microsoft Corporation.
With the scheduling of events, conflicts may occur when a user attempts to accept a calendar invitation to a new event, which has a conflicting time with an event that has already been scheduled and placed in the user's calendar. These and other calendar programs provide an ability to handle or resolve these types of meeting conflicts.
These types of tools, however, do not provide the user an ability to easily handle and resolve conflicts between multiple calendar invitations. Currently, a user may receive multiple calendar invitations for different events scheduled at the same time. These events are displayed to the user for processing. The user may accept one calendar invitation with that calendar invitation becoming scheduled in a calendar. Then, the user may desire to accept another calendar invitation, which overlaps or conflicts with the time for the first event that has already been scheduled. In such situation, the acceptance of the first calendar invitation has resulted in a reply already being sent to the sender of the first calendar invitation. In this case, the user must then request a change in the meeting time if the user decides that the second calendar invitation has a higher priority than the first one that has already been accepted.
For example, the first calendar invitation may be for a social event, while the second calendar invitation is for a required company meeting. In this case, the user has to send a request to the sender of the first calendar invitation to decline or suggest a different meeting time. When only a few calendar invitations, such as three or four, are present, the user may look at all of the calendar invitations and identify conflicts between the calendar invitations before accepting any of them. This solution becomes more difficult to use when numerous calendar invitations are present. As an example, if the user has 25 calendar invitations that have not been processed, the user has to review and identify conflicts between different events for all of the calendar invitations that have not yet been processed by the user.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for managing conflicts between calendar invitations for events in an electronic calendar.